ASEEES 2013: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Russian Jokes, Roundtable Proposal

[Artemi Romanov]

Dear SEELANGERs,

I would like to propose a Roundtable on Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Russian Jokes for 2013 ASEEES convention in Boston. I am looking for interested participants for the roundtable.  Please see the information below and contact me off-list (Artemi.Romanov at colorado.edu) if you are interested in contributing to the roundtable.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Russian Jokes

Humor, a unique human characteristic, is critical in thought, communication and social interaction. Traditional psychological perspective links humor and the corresponding laughter with inner psychological states of individuals (Martin 2007). The general theory of verbal humor (Attardo & Raskin 1991; Attardo 1997; Dynel 2009) anchored in semantic, cognitive and pragmatic theory describes a joke as a text compatible, at least partly, with two opposing semantic scripts, chunks of semantic information evoked by chosen words. Successful jokes involve a cognitive juxtaposition of mental sets (Goel & Dolan, 2001) followed by an affective feeling of amusement. Jokes can reflect dominant and changing social norms and arrangements active in speech community (Thielemann 2011).

The proliferation of Russian jokes in everyday life and on the internet coincided with a growing scholarly interest to these phenomena.  There is a high level of exposure to Russian jokes among Russian language speakers as jokes are told frequently and in various social situations. Russian linguists and specialists in sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics studied Russian jokes quite extensively in the last two decades (Dementiev 2008; Golev 2000; Kagan 2002; Karasik 1997; Khimik 2002; Sedov 2007). A recent special edition of the Russian Journal of Sociolinguistics was completely devoted to the study of Russian jokes covering such aspects as communicative strategy of Russian jokes (Tiupa 2009), evolution of anecdote genre in Russia (Shmeleva & Shmelev 2009), discursive functions of the Russian jokes  (Kashkin & Shilkina 2009), analysis of Russian political jokes from various time periods (Kosintsev 2009; Sheygal-Placzek 2009; Yelenevskaya 2009) and other features of Russian jokes.

The panel will focus on the discussion of recent trends in studying Russian jokes, including psycholinguistic, semantic, pragmatic, sociolinguistic, cross-cultural and other possible approaches as well analysis of stereotypes on which Russian jokes are based.

Please let me know ASAP if you are interested in participating as the deadline for submitting ASEEES proposals is January 15.


Sincerely,

Artemi Romanov
Associate Professor of Russian Studies
Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of Colorado at Boulder
Artemi.Romanov at colorado.edu


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